Fen considered. ‘Is it possible that the chocolates weren’t sent by the blackmailer at all?’
‘It’s possible, yes,’ said Bussy grudgingly. ‘But as far as the investigations have gone, it’s very unlikely. The husband, for various reasons with which I needn’t bother you, is quite definitely out of it. And we haven’t been able to unearth a shadow of motive for anyone else. It’s a fair assumption that the blackmailer is also the poisoner.’
‘You said “someone who was living in the neighbourhood”.’
‘The blackmail letters were posted in Sanford Morvel; so were the chocolates. Beyond that, we haven’t got any clue. The chocolates were in a small, flat container, and the poisoner was able to post them in a letter-box. So there’s no lead there – as there would have been if he’d left them at the post-office counter. The wrapping doesn’t help. Nor do the letters. So far, the case has been a series of dead ends.’
‘And the mechanism for conveying the blackmail money?’
‘Also a dead end. I can explain it, if you like’ (‘No, no,’ said Fen hastily), ‘but it’s a carefully contrived scheme, and there’s nothing at all useful to be deduced from it.’
‘So the result of this extensive nescience,’ Fen observed, ‘is that Scotland Yard has been called in.’
‘Not at all.’ Bussy grinned, ingenuously sly. ‘Scotland Yard has not been called in.’
‘From the point of view of the public, you mean.’
‘From the point of view of anyone. The Chief Constable is relying on Wolfe, the local Superintendent. Neither of them knows I’m here.’
‘Is this, then’ – Fen stared at him rather blankly – ‘a kind of criminological holiday task?’
‘No. It’s Lambert’s doing. Lambert is a friend of the Assistant Commissioner. Lambert doesn’t believe that the local people are capable of dealing adequately with the matter of his wife’s death. Lambert consequently asked the Assistant Commissioner to intervene. The Assistant Commissioner pointed out, very properly, that he couldn’t do that unless the Chief Constable asked him to – or at least, not without provoking a lot of bad blood. But he did agree to compromise between friendship and professional ethics by sending me down incognito. So I’m here officially-unofficially as it were, and Lambert is the only person locally who knows who I am and what I’m doing. For the purposes of the record, I’m on leave, and any meddling I do is simply the result of personal inquisitiveness.’
‘I should have thought that in that position you would have been hamstrung from the start.’
‘Not quite. No, not quite. It’s had certain positive advantages. . . . But now’ – Bussy’s glance was definitely wary – ‘you’ve heard a brief outline of the facts. Have you made that obvious deduction I was talking about?’
‘I’ve made one deduction which seems to me obvious,’ Fen replied cautiously.
‘Well?’
‘If the blackmailer is also the poisoner, with the motive you suggested – –’
‘Yes.’
‘And granted that Mrs Lambert’s husband was away, so that she had no one but the police to confide in – –’
‘Again, yes.’
In a few words Fen explained what he thought – and Bussy sat back in the chair with a sigh of relief so heartfelt as to be almost a groan.
‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to have doubts about my sanity. It is obvious, isn’t it? – and yet as far as I know, no one else has thought of it.’
‘You’ve found nothing to militate against that theory?’
‘No.’
Fen was abnormally pensive. ‘It wouldn’t stand by itself, of course,’ he said. ‘You’d need additional proof.’
Bussy knocked out his pipe, returned it to his pocket, and got to his feet. The breakfast table had by now a crumby, congealed look; the insect battalions continued to riot lightheartedly in the air above it; a bar of shadow which had stolen across Niobe’s milkmaid face had the effect of seeming to intensify her virtuous disquiet. Bussy glanced at her and then looked hurriedly away again, rather as a well-bred man might do who has happened on a girl undressing behind a rock.
‘I’ve got additional proof,’ he said. ‘Or rather, I anticipate having it in a day or two.’
Fen studied him a shade sombrely. ‘Be careful,’ he advised. ‘Your activities may have aroused suspicion, and a person who has risked one murder probably wouldn’t mind risking a second. Does anyone else know of this – this evidence you’re collecting?’
‘Not yet. It isn’t complete enough for a report.’
‘Then I should be particularly careful.’
Bussy wandered to the door. With his hand on the knob he said: ‘You needn’t worry. No one is likely to catch me unawares, I can assure you of that. . . . By the way, we’d better revert to the status of casual acquaintances.’
Fen nodded.
‘And you’ll keep what I’ve said absolutely to yourself?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good.’ Bussy smiled. ‘I must make a move now; there’s a good deal to be done. I shall be glad to put this poisoning creature in the dock – and apart from that, it might mean promotion for me. . . . Thanks for listening. Good-bye for the present.’ He waved a hand and was gone.
CHAPTER 9
THAT evening Fen went to his first election meeting.
At the outset it did not seem likely to be a conspicuous success.
The hall in Sanford Marvel which housed it was of that kind, peculiar to the English genius, whose heating is defective, whose lights illuminate only those parts which do not require illumination, whose windows are worked by an agglomeration of screws, rods, and cog-wheels of which the motive power, a detachable handle, seems perennially to be mislaid – a hall, in brief, which the architect has designed to accommodate itself to almost any social activity from church bazaars to The Mikado, and which in consequence accommodates itself to none. A large gathering might have humanized it to some extent, but there was not, in this instance, a large gathering. Even Captain Watkyn was slightly taken aback by the number of empty chairs.
‘Of course, old boy,’ he said sotto voce to Fen as they climbed on to the platform, ‘you haven’t got to expect too much bang off. And Strode and Wither are both holding meetings, otherwise there’d be more people here. Still . . .’
The chairman, to Fen’s surprise, proved to be Mr Judd – at the moment, perceptibly a creature moving about in worlds not realized. Fen had mentioned his name to Captain Watkyn at their previous meeting, and Captain Watkyn had coaxed him, by a considerable expenditure of energy, into officiating on Fen’s behalf. Viewing him now, Captain Watkyn was inclined to regret this step, for Mr Judd’s demeanour and speech embodied panic and black melancholy in about equal proportions.
‘I hate speaking in public,’ he kept muttering aggrievedly. ‘I detest speaking in public.’
‘Come, come,’ Fen muttered back. ‘I’m sure you’ll do very well.’
‘I shall not do very well.’
‘I happened,’ Fen pursued with shameless untruth, ‘to mention to Jacqueline that you were going to introduce me, and she said I couldn’t have found a better man.’
‘Did she?’ said Mr Judd doubtfully. ‘Did she really say that?’
‘Certainly she did. I gathered that she had a good deal of admiration for you.’ Fen paused fractionally to evolve fresh falsehoods. ‘Unluckily she couldn’t get here tonight, but I promised to tell her everything you said and did. And – quite off the record, of course – she said that if I was pleased with the show you put up, it would go a long way towards confirming her own good opinion of you.’
In a less flurried condition even Mr Judd would scarcely have swallowed this grossly implausible tale; but in the present circumstances his natural credulity was reinforced by the desire to clutch at any straw of consolation, and he brightened visibly.
‘Well, I’ll do the best I can,’ he conceded.
‘Of course you will. A
nd there’s no need for you to go on for long.’
In the event, however, this last inducement turned out to be singularly irrelevant. After a little initial clumsiness Mr Judd got quickly into his stride; and whereas earlier the problem had been to persuade him to start, the problem was now to persuade him to stop.
‘Hence it is,’ he was saying after twenty minutes’ uninterrupted magniloquence, ‘that we want – no, passionately and most urgently need – intelligent and disinterested men like our friend here to break and forever destroy the vicious circle of nepotism, jobbery, and Party conflict. And shall I tell you why it is in this constituency – this, and no other – that that great crusade must begin? The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is what we all know in our heart of hearts. And that answer is because it is in our incomparable countryside that England’s strength and wisdom and endurance reside – not in the haste and waste of the great Wens’ – Mr Judd was an assiduous reader of Cobbett – ‘but here, amid these fields and woods which have bred, and whose memory has sustained through every trial, every testing, our country’s very greatest men; here in the English countryside that has endured for centuries, and shall for centuries endure.’
Upon this resounding period Mr Judd paused for breath; and at last perceiving, or anyway decoding, the surreptitious signals which Captain Watkyn had been directing at him for the past ten minutes, brought his speech with ill-concealed reluctance to a close, and sat down amid more cordial applause than either he or anyone else could previously have anticipated.
Fen followed with a speech which, if less Ciceronian and impassioned than Mr Judd’s, was even more effective; and although its content does not bear summarizing, it succeeded in evoking some semblance of positive enthusiasm in the thirty or forty people present. Lecturing at Oxford had trained Fen to fluency in public speaking (though admittedly this happy consummation is inconspicuous in the majority of dons). By the highest standards his oratory was not exceptional, but it was none the less several degrees superior to anything that Wither or Strode could manage, for Strode’s mind worked slowly, so that his speeches were peppered with long intervals of dead silence while he considered what to say next; and Wither was prone to a facetiousness so abominable that even the electorate of Sanford – a district not renowned for delicacy of wit – felt it an affliction. Fen consequently started with a marked advantage over his opponents, and made so good an impression, even in the chilling circumstances of this first meeting, that for the first time Captain Watkyn began seriously to envisage the possibility of his being elected.
Such few questions as were asked, Fen answered with an appearance of great candour; and he was untroubled by heckling, since at this time the professional hecklers of the Labour and Conservative Parties were respectively occupied at the Conservative and Labour meetings. The close of Fen’s meeting consequently found everyone relatively gratified, and Mr Judd in a state of elation which bordered on incoherence. He fluttered about while Fen interviewed the canvassers whom Captain Watkyn had assembled in his cause, and insisted on returning to ‘The Fish Inn’ to be present while his triumph was communicated to Jacqueline. It was perhaps fortunate that on arrival there they found Jacqueline absent and Myra alone behind the bar. And Mr Judd’s disappointment, though great, proved possible to mitigate with cherry brandy and the vague assurance of a subsequent meeting.
Fen left him and went upstairs to change, for the evening’s exertions had made him sticky and uncomfortable. He took his time over this, and was somewhat abashed, on his return, to find that the bar had closed, and that Mr Judd, relapsing after his brief interregnum of glory into a more normal diffidence, had gone home. Myra was still there, however, and he asked for beer.
‘A pint, my dear?’
‘Please. And have something for yourself.’
Fen drank largely, and was on the point of demanding news of the lunatic, and of Constable Sly’s progress, when the door of the bar rattled as someone outside banged against it.
‘Now, who the devil’s that?’ said Myra.
She crossed to the door and unbolted it. The non-doing pig came in. It looked dusty and fatigued, as though it had just completed a very long journey.
‘My God, he’s back,’ said Myra.
‘Back?’
‘I sold him this afternoon. He didn’t want to go, I could see that. And now he’s escaped from Farmer Lumley and come all the way home.’ Myra was evidently rather moved by this demonstration of fidelity. With the toe of her shoe she prodded the non-doing pig amicably in the ribs, at which it staggered visibly.
‘Poor thing, he’s worn out,’ she said with compassion.
Fen put some beer in an enamel basin for the pig, and after it had drunk some of this it turned and staggered out of the door again, and they could hear it making its way round to the inn-yard.
‘He’ll have to be taken back tomorrow, though,’ said Myra firmly.
Fen finished his own beer and decided to go to bed. In parting from Myra he asked about the lunatic.
‘They haven’t caught him,’ Myra said, ‘though they think he’s still in the neighbourhood, because there’s been food stolen from one of the cottages. They say he’s got “a madman’s cunning”. which is their excuse for being too dim-witted to catch him. . . . Good night, my dear. Sleep well.’
By the following morning it was apparent that Mr Beaver and his renovations were no longer confined to the room in which Fen had first encountered them. A loss of their original concentration and vehemence was compensated for by a great increase in scope, with the result that – although as yet half the inn remained untouched – the clouds of plaster dust which emanated from the operation began to seem omnipresent. It was not easy, Fen found, to distinguish one member of the family from another. Basically, it was a family affair: Mr Beaver, his wife, and along withe them two sons and two daughters, all of whom looked about the same age – say, seventeen. But its composition was spasmodically varied by the addition of employees from Mr Beaver’s drapery business and of acquaintances whom Mr Beaver had cajoled by some means into volunteering for temporary service; and this, added to the family resemblances, the dirt which masked all their faces, and the general haggardness which resulted, no doubt, from repeated early rising, and the continual ingestion of powdered whitewash, did nothing to lessen Fen’s confusion.
And if the identities of these people were ineluctable, their aims were even more so. In the intervals of spurring on his band, Mr Beaver was, it is true, to be seen peering intently at some kind of architectural plan. But Fen, who chanced to find this lying about and examined it at length, was unable to equate it at any point with what Mr Beaver was actually doing, and was forced to the conclusion that he intended to make a clean sweep of the whole interior of the inn before attempting anything in the way of reconstruction. Partitions between rooms were pulled down, flooring was demolished, ceilings crumbled, doors were removed from their hinges and left lying about where the unwary might most readily fall over them. Fen’s room, and indeed all of the upper storey, remained for the present inviolate, but Fen doubted if this immunity was likely to last very much longer, and in the meantime meals had to be transferred to a sort of boxroom upstairs, where the eating of them was a comfortless business. The noise increased hourly. Since the weather remained fine and warm, customers at the bar preferred to do their drinking outside, in the pleasant grounds of the inn.
During the morning and the earlier part of the afternoon Fen was busy canvassing in Sanford Morvel, his efforts, though variously received, increasing rather than diminishing Captain Watkyn’s hopes of a victorious outcome to the election. In the matter of personality, Fen was more generously endowed than either of his opponents; he could talk easily and amusingly to anyone, of whatever class or occupation, and this gift was not shared either by Strode, who got on well enough with the lower orders but was tongue-tied in the presence of anyone having an income of more than five hundred a year, or by Wither, who was effusive with the monied
classes but offensively bluff with everyone else. A certain unease regarding Fen’s candidature was already being felt at Labour and Conservative headquarters. Neither had put an outstanding candidate into the field, partly because the election was not likely to be a political portent, occurring as it did in one of the brief hiatuses between the succession of domestic crises of that year, and partly because both parties – with some justification in view of the General Election result – regarded the outcome as a certain Conservative victory. Fen’s late appearance on the scene had consequently taken them unawares, and now they were beginning to wish they had put up representatives more formidable than either Strode or Wither. However, it was, as Captain Watkyn observed, too late for them to do anything about it now that Nomination Day was over.
‘And mark my words, old boy,’ he added, ‘the personal touch is going to be devilishly important. Where there’s political apathy it always is – in fact, it’s the only thing that’ll induce some people to vote at all.’
Further support for Fen came from an unexpected quarter, namely the editor of the Sanford Advertiser and Peek Gazette, whose offices Fen and Captain Watkyn visited in Sanford Morvel High Street. It transpired that this ancient but vigorous person, whose name was Gamage, had early in his journalistic career been successfully defended on an indictment for seditious libel by Fen’s father, that learned if unaccountable barrister whose eccentricities are still remembered in the Inns of Court; and that in view of this notable service he was prepared to give Fen every assistance in his power.
‘That’s a stroke of luck, old boy,’ said Captain Watkyn as they left the office. ‘Mind you, we mustn’t expect too much from it – no good counting our chickens before they’re hatched – but it’ll help to keep you in the public eye, and that’s half the battle.’ He rubbed his hands together gleefully. ‘I tell you what, we’ll have a drink on that.’
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